This invention relates generally to catheters, and more specifically to assemblies and methods that may be used for delivering and deploying one or more implantable medical devices including, without limitation: stents, grafts, stent-grafts, vena cava filters, expandable frameworks, etc., hereinafter referred to collectively as stents, within a body lumen.
When advancing a catheter through a body lumen radiopaque marker bands are sometimes located within the vicinity of the catheter tips or medical device in order to better locate the position of the catheter during a medical procedure.
It is known that the marker bands provided on some catheters tend to increase the profile of the catheter, often undesirably. The marker bands may also become dislodged or shifted, which can give false readings on the location of one or more portions of the catheter such as the medical device receiving region, the distal region, etc. It would be desirable to provide a catheter whose position can be located during a procedure without the addition of marker bands.
The art referred to and/or described above is not intended to constitute an admission that any patent, publication or other information referred to herein is “prior art” with respect to this invention.
All US patents and applications and all other published documents mentioned anywhere in this application are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Without limiting the scope of the invention a brief summary of some of the claimed embodiments of the invention is set forth below. Additional details of the summarized embodiments of the invention and/or additional embodiments of the invention may be found in the Detailed Description of the Invention below.
A brief abstract of the technical disclosure in the specification is provided as well only for the purposes of complying with 37 C.F.R. 1.72. The abstract is not intended to be used for interpreting the scope of the claims.